A Frame of Reference

A Frame of Reference

I write this on a Saturday morning.

A damp, overcast Saturday morning has risen over the ever-moving city that is Mumbai. I say ever-moving because even on a purported weekend, there is an unceasing flurry of movement visible on the street down below. Black and yellow auto rickshaws, small and big cars, the random stray dog, hawkers hauling their wares, pedestrians with hands full of umbrellas, children, and phones — all jostling for space on a street whose appetite has been satiated several times over, and then some.

I close my eyes.

The imagery stays back. In the blackness that surrounds me, sounds paint the picture of my neighbourhood. An orchestra of vehicular horns — the bold and thumpy honks of the new Hondas and Mahindras, the old and fluttering bleats of the Premier Padminis and auto-rickshaws, the nervous yet resolute trings of the bicycles, all coming together in one discordant opera. The splishes and splashes of boots, tyres, and paws stepping into puddles and potholes. The cackle of humans — some laughing, some shouting. The barks of dogs hunting their next meal. The peal of bells at a temple nearby. Strange as it may sound, the sounds conjure a surprisingly vivid sight.

I open my eyes again. The scene has stayed still, its characters now gone replaced by people anew.

Isn’t it astonishing that a once sub-marine landmass reclaimed from the Arabian Sea became one of the world’s densest metropolitan centres of civilisation? A city that in spite of its laundry list of flaws and quirks and idiosyncrasies continues to pull people both young and old from across the country and even neighbouring nations. A city that while gasping for space for each new resident continues to accommodate the dreams of a thousand more each day.

Ahh yes, space. The pièce de résistance of commodities in Mumbai. Being a city surrounded by water, with little scope to expand, it has learnt to prize pin codes over living conditions. The value of the land beneath your feet fluctuates wildly every few kilometres. Even within a locality, residents of the Western half command more respect than their Eastern counterparts, owing to their proximity to the sea. While space on the ground has long run out owing to the steady influx of dreamy-eyed immigrants, builders continue to whip up more space out of thin air by scraping the skies, one floor at a time. A by-product of this is Mumbai’s glittering skyline — a streak of gold and silver in the night sky. The envy of many an Indian city.

It is common for properties in Mumbai to boast titles such as “sea view”, “sea link view”, “skyline view”. My humble residence in Andheri East, however, has something which can only be called, well, “a view”.

The view from my apartment’s window is predominantly occupied by a single apartment complex — Nirman Galaxy. And boy, does it live up to its name. If you stand at my window (no balconies — they are a rich people thing in Mumbai), you can turn your head left — there’s Nirman Galaxy. You can turn your head right — there’s Nirman Galaxy. Look down — there’s the Nirman Galaxy parking lot and the aforementioned boisterous street. It’s only when you look up that you see a sliver of the sky which reminds you that yes, there are things in the world out there other than Nirman Galaxy. It is for this reason that I have given my residence the highly distinctive (and probably unsought) title of “Galaxy View”.

So while Shahrukh Khan narrates dreamy-eyed stories in glossy tabloids about how looking at the sea from his balcony placates him and makes him realise how insignificant he is in the grand scheme of things, I have to make do with an apartment complex that is unapologetically close to mine and its run-of-the-mill residents. Sigh.

It won’t take Arundhati Roy’s skills to help you visualise Nirman Galaxy. At 7 stories tall, it looks like any other generic apartment in any part of the city. Painted in drab shades of grey and beige, it is a building constructed by builders to house the maximum number of families in the smallest space possible. Looking at the spiritless cuboid of concrete, one can’t help but think that aesthetics, personalisation and character were attributes that weren’t deprioritised but rather abandoned altogether. Each room’s window on each floor has a metal grill to prevent zany kids (or adults for that matter) from skydiving but more often it serves as a stand for drying clothes. Go ahead, picture a grey and beige apartment with 7 floors and barred windows. Yes, that’s it. Hold that image.

But homes are more than slabs of bricks and plaster and paint, aren’t they? Akin to Amazon delivery boxes, homes today are virtually indistinguishable on the outside. It is the box’s contents which bring a smile to the face. The articles which adorn the walls and floors and ceilings of a home tell stories about the people who live in them. Some were curated, carefully chosen after hours of research, some were bought impulsively. Some were inherited from generations now forgotten, some were bought yesterday on an app. Some were optimised to fit into a monetary limitation, some were indulgent splurges. Some are hand-crafted intricacies, some are mass-manufactured, supply chain optimised commodities. Some are handled and maintained with the utmost care, some suffer from abject neglect. Some are needs, some are wants.

So while on the outside, Nirman Galaxy appears to be a grid of repeating cells all cut from the same grey and beige cloth, the people living in these cells have made them their grey and beige cells.

This isn’t poetic speculation, but rather a cross-apartmental observation I have made over the few months I have lived here. Allow me to share the curious case of Nirman Galaxy’s 4th floor, home to the Mahajans and the Deshmukhs. While the constructors left behind brick-for-brick facsimile living rooms in both the flats, the Mahajan family’s sturdy teak sofa with the soft maroon cushioning represents the family’s much finer taste for the finer things in life compared to the Deshmukh family’s bench-like wrought iron sofa, which while they might parade as being minimalistic is perhaps veiled austerity. The Deshmukhs make up for it however with their spanking new 50” TV on which Mr Deshmukh devotedly watches the day’s news each evening. The wall-mounted 32” LCD with the thick bezels in the Mahajan living room is practically begging for a replacement.

At this point, I must clarify that I do not know the Mahajans and the Deshmukhs personally. A person spending a weekend writing about grey and beige buildings is unlikely to be a very social person. I have never placed a foot inside Nirman Galaxy and as a matter of fact, I do not even know what the families’ actual names are. Mahajan and Deshmukh are the two most common Marathi surnames I know and how I have christened these families in my head. How do I know whether the sofas are comfortable or not? I don’t. But the fact that Mr Mahajan sprawls on his sofa while watching the news makes me confident about my judgement since Mr Deshmukh’s straight posture on his sofa rivals that of the news anchor he is listening to.

Well, the straight posture can also be accredited to Mr Deshmukh’s much fitter body which he painstakingly maintains by practising yoga in the morning. Much before the curtains are pulled apart to let the morning sunshine seep into the Mahajan household, Mr Deshmukh and his better half can be found conveying their Namaskars to the sun while balancing on one leg like a pair of flamingoes. It’s not that Mr Mahajan isn’t good at balancing, but the society doesn’t pride itself on people who can balance hot cups of tea on their potbellies while taking a bite of biscuits.

However, there is someone whose pride can be measured by wrapping a measuring tape around Mr Mahajan’s waist. To call Mrs Mahajan a passionate cook would be an understatement. Her kitchen coffer and aromas on offer are famed across the seven floors of Nirman Galaxy and Mr Mahajan, her biggest mureed (devotee) has since long adopted a no-holds-barred approach to her food. Through the once transparent kitchen window that has now become translucent with years’ worth of layers of oil and soot and other culinary depositions, one can see her fervently at work for a sizeable chunk of the day. After all, with pickles to pickle, purées to purée, mashes to mash and stews to stew, how people get any time out of the kitchen is something she fails to understand. Three times a day, Mrs Mahajan turns food into happiness for her family and proudly earns the finger-lickings, lip-smackings and unabashed burps her husband and children reward her with at the dining table.

Meals at the Deshmukh’s however, seem to be a more stern affair. In the quest for a healthy lifestyle, Mrs Deshmukh forgoes the delectable spread of umpteen dishes in favour of a light but nutritious meal. Compared to dinners at the Mahajans which are a flurry of grease-covered hands scouring a bevy of utensils, dinners at the Deshmukhs are a zen-like ballet of knives and forks and spoons, eaten slowly, with purpose. While Mrs Mahajan bounces between the kitchen and the dining table delivering hot rotis which themselves bounce between her hands, the Deshmukhs mostly eat together on their dining table, discussing their days and other matters of relevance. On days when the Mahajans invite the Deshmukhs over for dinner, Mrs Mahajan makes a big fuss about how little the Deshmukh children eat, and how at this age, all children need big dollops of desi ghee on their parathas.

The kids of these two households, like tendrils assuming the shape of the world around them, mirror the personalities of their parents. The Mahajan children, like most children their age love to have fun in amounts bigger than what their parents deem as appropriate for them. This involves hours of cartoons on television while devouring packet after packet of chips and then licking the masala that remains stuck to their fingers. It involves practising wrestling moves with each other till the time one of them gets hurt enough to go crying in front of Mrs Mahajan seeking retribution. It involves being smacked on the head for refusing to study a day before an exam and then unwillingly plonking your head in a textbook while daydreaming about all the fun you would have when you grow up and these stupid parents would have no control over you.

The Deshmukh children however have been modelled to become the kids whom parents look towards longingly while other kids look at with abject hatred for setting unreal expectations. They are the kids who return from school and proceed to keep their shoes in the shoe rack and their lunchboxes in the kitchen sink. They are the kids who not just leave for their evening playtime on time but return on time as well. They are the kids who have to be called to dinner multiple times, not because there is Lauki on the menu but because they are too engrossed in their studies to bother with food. They are the kids who have learnt to mature on demand, never mind their biological ages.

If you have made it here, I applaud you. In the 9 minutes that it took you to reach here, you could have scrolled through 50 reels, each specially chosen by the algorithm to release dopamine in your bloodstream. Instead, you chose to read about uncles and aunties and their daily boring lives — good for you! However, at this point, you are perhaps wondering what is the point of all this. Nine and a half minutes ago, this story began at a seemingly random point and now, where does this end?

You see, that is exactly my concern. What is the point of all this, and where does this story end? Why do people spend their lives attempting to become different from others?

For those of you who paid attention in physics lessons in school, you would be familiar with the concept of frames of reference — an object can have different states of motion when perceived from different frames of reference. Put simply, while driving a car you are in a state of motion for someone standing on the road outside but are at rest for the other passengers in your car.

When we read our little tale from the frame of the Mahajans or the Deshmukhs, they are leading lives that couldn’t be further apart from each other. They have made conscious decisions to stand out and enact their lives according to a set of unwritten rules that they believe will take their lives in vastly different directions. They choose to build their little world, piece by piece in a manner as unique as possible, to gain the reassurance that they are in control of their lives and their fate. They attach importance to their little victories and their little losses. Every feat achieved is solely their achievement. Every little setback causes them to ask, why only me?

However, if we take a step back and observe things from my frame of reference — my window, we can see these two trains are heading towards the same station, passing through the same checkpoints along the way, just along different routes. In fact on different floors of Nirman Galaxy, one can observe different versions of the Mahajans and the Deshmukhs, all chugging along life for reasons they don’t fully understand. In each grey and beige cell of Nirman Galaxy, come morning, people are waking up and performing similar chores and heading out to work to win their battles of the day. Come evening, they return to their homes, some battles won, some lost. Each night, fires are stoked in every kitchen to produce what each house thinks is best for them. Come midnight, the lights go off in each home to start things all over again.

Across the spectrum, all species, living or extinct have evolved to pursue two broad objectives, eat food and reproduce. Taken together, these processes ensure that species are able to move from day to day and generation to generation, keeping the circle of life spinning. No species questions this fundamental doctrine of nature and within a particular species, it is hard to distinguish between 2 organisms.

Not humans though. No other species attempts to stand out as much as we do. Perhaps because we have replaced these two age-old objectives with one unifying pursuit of an emotion — happiness.

Behind our every action, and every conquest is a fundamental desire to become happier than we were before. This happiness can take the form of money, a new person in our life, a new living being we create, a fulfilling meal, a shiny car, a haircut that causes others to turn their heads, an uplifting yoga session, a song that makes you stop and smile, a pat on the back from a loved one, a promotion at the workplace, a smile on someone else’s face. This little emotion is what every home in Nirman Galaxy is chasing, via different means and different methods, while being under the impression that their desires are one of a kind.

One may ask that if happiness is the ultimate quest for all our actions — good or bad, why then is the world an increasingly unhappy place?

It’s hard to say for sure, but my belief is that unlike needs such as nutrition and reproduction which have been around for millions of years, happiness is a relatively recent conquest which our species has embarked upon. We still haven’t figured out what happiness truly is, or how to achieve it. We still haven’t developed a metric to compare feelings of happiness against each other. People peddle different ways of attaining happiness — spiritualism, capitalism, self-love, violence or narcotics. In this state of transition, it is inevitable that chaos, conflict and confusion would ensue. For a clear picture to come through, we need to wait for the dust to settle.

Until then, the residents of Nirman Galaxy would continue to go about their lives thinking highly of themselves and sneering at how others go about squandering theirs.

How long will it take for this realisation to come through?

Who knows. But centuries from now, when you and I would be forgotten and this article lost amongst the zettabytes of data produced by humanity, if the Mahajans and Deshmukhs of the world look at each other and accept their differences in opinion as means of moving towards a common goal, humanity would have cracked the code.